Microsoft Outlook is a personal information manager

Personal information manager

A personal information manager is a type of application software that functions as a personal organizer. The acronym PIM is now, more commonly, used in reference to Personal information management as a field of study...

 from Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

, available both as a separate application as well as a part of the Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office is a non-free commercial office suite of inter-related desktop applications, servers and services for the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, introduced by Microsoft in August 1, 1989. Initially a marketing term for a bundled set of applications, the first version of...

 suite. The current version is Microsoft Office Outlook 2010 for Windows and Microsoft Office Outlook 2011 for Mac.

Although often used mainly as an email

Email

Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

 application, it also includes a calendar

Calendaring software

Calendaring software is software that minimally provides users with an electronic version of a calendar. Additionally, the software may provide an appointment book, address book, and/or contact list. These tools are an extension of many of the features provided by time management software such as...

, task manager, contact manager, note taking, a journal

Journal (computing)

In computer storage, a journal is a chronological record of data processing operations that may be used to construct or reinstate an historical or alternative version of a computer system or computer file....

 and web browsing.

It can be used as a stand-alone application, or can work with Microsoft Exchange Server

Microsoft Exchange Server

Microsoft Exchange Server is the server side of a client–server, collaborative application product developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Microsoft Servers line of server products and is used by enterprises using Microsoft infrastructure products...

 and Microsoft SharePoint Server for multiple users in an organization, such as shared mailboxes and calendars, Exchange public folders, SharePoint lists and meeting schedules.